Hello one and all- greetings from Peru! It was lovely to see those of you that we managed to while we were in the UK, and for those we didn’t: we’ll definitely see you when we’re back for good. Now, though, I thought it might be time to jump back on the old word horse and start polluting the blogosphere with my wafflings.

We got to Cusco after about 30 hours of travel, including a wonderful 6 hours in Lima airport between 4 and 10am. I can highly recommend it. Once again BA was grand, and American Airlines confirmed my view that it is basically Megabus with wings. Unbelievably village. It was particularly lovely, given our level of sleep deprivation, to be met at the airport in Cusco by Sophie and Dave, and steered into a taxi to a pre-arranged hostel. Thanks again guys!

We spent a few days in Cusco acclimatizing to the altitude (3,310m), the necessity of which became apparent after I nearly blacked out carrying my bag up a flight of stairs on the first day. Turns out there isn’t so much oxygen up here. After our bodies had been given a chance to stump up a few more red blood cells, we tackled some of the Inca sites around Cusco (such as the brilliantly named Sachsayhuaman, which has the honour of making all touts in Cusco sound like they are asking if you “want to see sexy woman”). We also spent a day in the Sacred Valley (Valle Sagrada), visiting the ruins at Ollantaytambo and the bizarre circular terraces at Moray (which archaeologists say is a sort of Inca laboratory, aimed at finding the best temperatures to grow different crops, but having been there I am entirely certain it was a gig venue. Awesome acoustics- see pic left).

One of the most notable motifs of our first week or so in Cusco was the excitement surrounding the arrival of Don Bosco. There were posters up all over town advertising the big event on the 18^th and 19^th March, so we assumed he was either some sort of firebrand evangelical preacher or a Daniel O’Donnell style crooner. The truth, it turned out, was far weirder: he was a corpse. To be precise, the 130-old embalmed corpse of John “Don” Bosco, the founder of the Salesian order of the Roman Catholic church, which apparently focuses on caring for disadvantaged young boys around the world. It then emerged, on further investigation, that there is in fact some controversy about whether Don Bosco, how should I put this… , “cared” for young boys a little too much. So what we were greeted with when we wandered down to the Plaza de Armas on Friday evening was the sight of hundreds of reverential Catholics carrying the desiccated carcass of a century-old suspected pederast on their shoulders in a glass coffin. If you doubt the truth of this, here is some Youtube footage of said event. Weird.

Of course, the main focus of our extremely pleasant fortnight with Soph and Dave (apart from celebrating Fran’s birthday, which we successfully did on a day bookended by pancakes for breakfast and rum cocktails in the evening), was not dead priests with predilictions for young boys, but rather aiming to do some trekking to one of the major Inca sites in the Andes surrounding Cusco. Unfortunately because of the recent serious flooding Macchu Picchu was still closed, so we settled instead on a four day trek to Choquequirao, another lost Inca city discovered by Hiram Bingham in the 1920s. And here’s what happened…

We decided to find our own guide, rather than book on a tour, as it seemed to have the advantage of being cheaper and leaving more flexibility. It turned out that we didn’t have to look very far, as one of the local guys who worked part time in our hostel (the improbably named Alan) spent the rest of his time being a guide all over the surrounding area. After chatting through the logistics, we were pretty happy to join Team Alan, and set Monday morning as the tee-off time.

Come Monday morning, all ran smoothly. The only slight change of plan was that 2 other people- a Czech couple- had also arranged to do the Choquequirao trek through Alan, but needed an English speaking guide. Hence Alan’s mate Juan Carlos arrived on the scene. Despite a few minor roadwork-related delays we managed to get started on the walk from the small town of San Pedro de Cachora by early afternoon. The first day was beautiful, and exactly the thing to lull us into a false sense of security- 11km of gently undulating track, beautiful hummingbirds flitting around, wonderful mountain vistas (including the imposing 6,271m of Mt Salkantay- see left), then a few hours of descent into the Apurimac river valley.

The next morning was to shatter any illusions we might have had about this trek being easy, however. After a 4.30am start (brekkie at 5am in the dark), we descended for another hour until we reached the river at a bridge. All in all, we had come down 1,500m. We then crossed the bridge and began what might be the hardest thing I have ever done- a 3 ½ hour, 1,200m ascent up the incredibly steep other side of the valley, to the village of Marampata. It is the closest I ever want to come to dying through exercise, and when I eventually reached the top (a way behind Soph, Dave and Fran, I have to admit- although I maintain that my rucksack was weighing me down…), I quite literally collapsed on the ground. For evidence, see the photo of three very tired people (left). After we had lunch an hour or so later, I had to go outside and collapse again as well. After a small and entirely involuntary sleep, I felt pretty refreshed- which was good, because it turned out that the rest of the day wasn’t set aside for a Gin Rummy competition and catching up on correspondence, but rather for a 5 hour round trip walking to the ruins of Choquequirao. Wheeee…

In fairness the ruins were really good, although I’m not sure any of us were at our most receptive. Their setting, in particular is absolutely stunning (see right), spread across a mountain outcrop with amazing views of the river valley below and the larger mountains all around. After we dragged ourselves back, we sat down for dinner, which was chicken soup for us, and roasted cuy or guinea pig for the two Czechs, which we also got to sample. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it had too many bones and looked just a bit too much like a sewer rat that had been thrown on a barbecue for my liking (as you can probably see from the picture- left).

Day three seemed like it would be fine - just going back down the way we climbed up yesterday, and then beginning up the other side. However, it turns out that 4 hours of downhill is quite hard for people with knees made of biscuits and sellotape, like me (and also Fran to an extent, although I hesitate to tar her with the same brush of crippledom that I am painted with). Added to that was the fact that the 1 hour descent to the river that we did first thing on the morning of day two, which had been fine at 6am, was instead a gruelling 1 ½ hour uphill slog in the boiling heat of the midday sun and the rarified air of 1,500m above sea level. I had to keep stopping every five mins or so to rest (sounds pathetic, I know, but I would honestly suggest that you try it before judging me), and was completely spent by the time we arrived at camp for lunch. Luckily we had 2 hours to relax and sleep after we had eaten, which meant that I actually had enough energy for the 2 ½ hour more of uphill that we had to do in the late afternoon to reach our campsite for the night.

Unfortunately it turned out that everyone else, including a couple of tour groups with big support staffs, had decided to stay in the same very small campsite as well. This meant that we had no access to the one permanent shelter, and so had to construct a temporary one of our own. Enthused by the success of this venture, we went on to construct an entire dining suite, which as you can see was awesome. (pic left). Because it was the last night, as well as the planned dinner, Alan cooked up every other item of food we had left. This meant that we had a massive bucket of popcorn as an amuse bouche, before fried, cheese-filled crackers, then soup, and finally a huge bowl of pasta. Pretty full after that one…

The prospects for day 4 took a pretty steep nosedive when I awoke at 1am in the morning to the sound of torrential rain and the realization that the outer flap of our tent had been left open so quite a lot of the water was finding its way onto the end of my sleeping bag. I didn’t get back to sleep, so I was also aware by the time we woke up that the rain hammering on our tent had been doing so pretty much continuously for 4 hours. And this had had a pretty dire effect on the ground, which had turned into a filthy quagmire. Luckily for us we didn’t have to pack up the tent (the faintly superhuman arrieros did this for us), so we just got walking instead. This turned out to be hard work, as the combination of a thick layer of mud and a steep incline meant that we basically had to cross-country ski our way to the top of the mountain, and then squelch our way along for another 11km to the finish. (See left for a pic of us at the high point- both literally and figuratively- of the trek)

Back in Cusco, we returned to the hostel and took our filthy clothes to the laundry to let an unfortunate Peruvian women attempt to deal with. After a bit of downtime, we headed out for a celebratory drink and dinner, which turned out to be in Cusco’s premier Irish pub, Paddy O’Flaherty’s. Now normally, I wouldn’t condone this sort of thing, as I don’t really approve of the global spread of “Oirish” bars, but in this instance it turned out to be a masterstroke as not only is Paddy’s actually quite a decent pub, but they were also able to serve us four massive, thoroughly deserved, and heartily appreciated burgers. Good times.

Soph and Dave’s original plan to leave for Lima on the Friday was slightly scuppered by a minor “ATM eating bank card” incident, which was happily resolved successfully, but meant that they ended up staying an extra day. We decided that we would carpe the diem on this Saturday by catching the bus to Pisac to see the final remaining major ruins on our boleto touristico tickets. This turned out to be really enjoyable, as the ruins were really beautiful (see piccie- left) (although we decided against the 8km hike up to them from the town, and got a taxi instead). Back in Cusco, we bid farewell to Soph and Dave at 3ish, and turned our thoughts towards our life for the next 2 months: learning Spanish and volunteering, of which more in future posts…